Electronic Art

Principal Investigator

Jonathan McCabe

Australian Centre for the Arts and Technology

As part of my Master of Electronic Art course, I am making animations
of abstract patterns produced
by a process of artificial selection. A major goal of my research is to
find functions of images which rank them in a similar way to the way I do.
If such functions can be found, they may be useful in clarifying the basis
of aesthetic judgement. I have found that measures of the amount of information
required to describe an image correlate with how "interesting"
that image appears to be.

Projects

MDSS

How did the MDSS help in archieving the project's
results?

The MDSS is very useful for storing the data for an animation. A frame
of uncompressed video requires 1.3 megabytes, and there are 25 frames per
second or 1 500 frames per minute. So at almost 2 gigabytes per minute,
an animation of any length requires mass storage.

If the MDSS was not available, sections of the animation would have to
go to video tape immediately as there is no long term disk space of that
size. Animation could only be produced when both the computational resources
and the video output resources were simultaneously available. The MDSS allows
better resource use by removing this limitation, letting me use either resource
when it is in low demand by other users. MDSS increases the usefulness of
the other resources used in this project and has resulted in a better outcome.